Mopar Muscle LA Small-Block Showdown – Small-Block Superstars!

The "LA Rams" Get Down At E-Town

The premise is simple enough. Rent a track for a day, invite a handful of people to bring out their cars, and give them a chance to dial in their combinations. It’s not a chance to win an eliminator or stage a race; rather, it’s a rare opportunity to get as many runs down the track as you want, science out components, and get real-world performance numbers for your efforts. Cool, huh?

Actually, we can’t take credit for thinking up this program; that goes to the folks at Primedia’s New Jersey offices. Through the agreement they have with noted NHRA facility Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey, on certain Thursdays, the company pays for the track personnel and the invited-only guests to go at it for eight hours. Some time ago, HPM editor Greg Rager selected a group of small-block racers to come to the track. This included drag cars, street cars, stroker projects, forced induction monsters, and Pro Street versions. Most, of course, were based around the venerated LA-series 318/340/360 of the ’64-’90 era, with one exception: a 360/300hp crate motor Magnum, which is still a “close cousin” to the LA family.

We were blessed with good October weather, and with Primedia Shootout veterans Tom DeMauro, Jim Campisano, and Dan Foley making sure everything went smoothly, our team of seven assaulted the quarter-mile. The next several pages show their cars, their performances, and their reflections on the day. Due to noise restrictions, every car had mufflers.

Georgia ThunderGene Rivers, age: 43, Snellville, GA
Gene Rivers, who towed up all the way from Snellville, Georgia, with his E-Body, took home the best time slip of the day and garnered the “long distance” award. Gene’s beast is a factory ‘Cuda 340 that now uses some hefty internals to displace 396 inches of small-block thunder. Gene, who won several musclecar-type shootouts in the late ’80s and early ’90s, admits he’s probably ruined this car as a collector’s item, but he has those regular 11-second timeslips to prove it was all worth it.

Gene’s plan was to simply get laps in and fine-tune the engine for better performances. The fairly radical car is normally street-driven 100 miles when going to Atlanta Dragway, but the crew towed to New Jersey. Previously, his best time had been an 11.55 at 117.9, a number he bettered on all but two runs this day.

Duster or Bust!Mark Abate, age: 36, Deer Park, NY
For Mark Abate of Deer Park, New York, the day began bright and sunny until he rolled out of the bleach box and up to the line. The bite was good-so good, in fact, that the rest of his driveline voted his four-speed yoke as the “weakest link,” with predictable and devastating results. A mechanic by trade, Mark didn’t quit, and spent several hours chasing down pieces and getting the driveshaft fixed. He was able to make a few quick squirts before we finished for the day.

Mark’s plan had been to dial-in a new Calvert Racing mono-leaf/CalTraks rear suspension he had just put under his car. Obviously, the breakage prevented him from getting the bugs worked out, and the one preload change he had time to make did more harm than good. Nonetheless, he gets the “Good Spirit In the Face of Adversity” award for the day. Does the car look familiar? Mopar Muscle readers will remember it as the 425-horse bomb seen in our Carlisle Dyno Challenge feature in December.

Over the LimitChuck Oliver, age: 36, Bethpage, NY
Empire State resident Chuck Oliver is a die-hard Chrysler guy. We know, because he called as we were finishing this story to tell us he had lost his job for taking the day off to come to our event. Unfortunately, Chuck’s problems really began when he decided to see just how much the 130,000-mile 318 bottom-end in his ’81 Dodge Mirada would take. Luckily, though the experiment failed in a spectacular fashion, he owns a couple of other ’80s era V8 Mopars to use until it gets fixed.

Chuck got Rager’s attention at Carlisle last summer because under the hood of his clean machine was a B&M supercharged/ NOS-equipped small-block with worked heads. As Chuck readily admits, the ’80s era cars normally don’t get any respect. He proved his point at E-Town as he screamed down into the 11s with an engine package that normally never gets a second look. We’ve got to hand it to you, pal, it was an eye-opener.

“I wanted an 11-second time slip, so I got that. Hey, I got my car in a mag, I blew up the motor, and I learned about nitrous oxide. After my second run, the car stalled crossing the finish line and I had trouble getting it started like there was a compression problem. The motor spun over OK, so I figured the lifters had pumped up and I waited 10-15 minutes to let them bleed down. It started, but there was a fluctuation in the boost/vacuum gauge. Maybe that 6,500 rpm blast over the finish line was a little more than the 130,000-mile tappets could take, and the next 7,000 rpm lap finished ’em off!

“The damage was I broke the #6 rod and that also took out the valves on that side of the motor, so I’ll have to get my good heads redone. I’m a single parent of two children, and I own four Miradas right now. My favorite moment in this car, other than the 11.8 pass, was when I got pulled over by the local police after doing a massive First and Second-gear powerbrake burnout on the street. He asked, “What are you doing?” and I told him I was sorry; I must have let the clutch out too quickly. He pointed his flashlight at my feet, then back up at me, and said, “Son, this car Don’t Have a clutch!”

30-deg, no air cleaner, 75-horse nitrous shot, feather gas pedal in First gear

3

3500

5500

1.88

7.68/90.32

12.11/109.4

30-deg., add slicks, add gas, 150-horse nitrous shot—worth 4/10s!

4

3500

5500

1.85

7.75/88.51

12.24/108.5

30-deg., 200-horse nitrous shot; blower belt slipping, so lost boost and blew oil into engine compartment due to blowby

5

4000

6000

1.79

7.56/90.93

11.87/112.9

Same, heated slicks more for traction, big number but major misfires in in Second and Third gears.

6

4000

7000

1.82

7.43/68.94

15.93/55.93

Connecting rod broke and engine explosion, blowby covers engine bay with oil. Car still starts to get it up on the trailer! Mopar or no car!

Magnum ForceJoe Luis, Age: 32, Roselle Park, NJ
Getting the most out of his street car is what Garden State native Joe Luis has in mind, and to that end, he decided to forgo finding and building a used engine and bought a 360/300 horse crate motor from Mopar Performance. His ’68 Dart GT is really set up for street cruising; he and his wife drove with us to the Mopar Nats on the Keystone Caravan last year. The Dart, a deal he says he could not pass up, is a followup to a Pro Street Demon project that got out of hand.

Joe and his brother came to spend the day finding out small things about the car. The package is well balanced, and Joe uses a Holley carb instead of the OE-type fuel injection on the car. The numbers he ran, considering the fact that this A-Bomb is all throttle, no bottle, may help us understand why the Magnum engine has been so well-received.

Charging ForwardBruce Cooke Age: 48, Pompton Lakes, NJ
While most of us would love to own a 500-inch classic B-Body drag car, that isn’t always in the realm of financial availability. For Bruce Cooke of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, the fun comes from getting the most out of a stock-displacement small-block. Bruce has only $5,000 tied up in the car, a former Stock Eliminator machine that toured the nation in the 1970s.

A high school math teacher by trade, Bruce has a ’78 Aspen with a Slant Six for regular transportation, while he drives the Charger to the track and on weekends. His quote: “Trailers are for boats!” Bruce intended to use his day for tuning the car to the ambient air temp, so he spent much of the day swapping jets in his Holley. The results he got were interesting, and the big car turned some nice numbers even with small-block power under the bonnet.

R-E-S-P-E-C-TAnna Bryant, age: 55, Suffolk, VA
Well, there are stories and then there are stories. For Anna Bryant, running this ’66 Barracuda is just another stage of an eventful life. Anna was born in a Russian concentration camp (yes, seriously), escaping with her family when she was nine months old. She came to America at age 5, and says she was shy and introverted until her husband Collis dared her to go drag racing several years ago. He bought the car as a diamond in the rough, saying it had a lot of potential; Anna remembers she didn’t even want it because it looked so bad. The couple also has a pair of ’64 Valiants and a ’64 Barracuda waiting in line to be fixed up.

Regardless, the plan from the start had been to put together an economical package. This car uses a store-bought ’77 318 replacement engine and shifts in Drive, so Anna and Collis planned to use the day to dial the car up for the Chrysler Classic at Virginia Motorsports Park the following weekend. Anna finished Third in the points at VMP this past season, and has qualified for the bracket finals seven years running. The car works well; they got 13 laps in.

“We run the spread-bore carb because it gives better launch and 60-foot times with this combination compared to the square-bore carb, and we didn’t change jets because the top gasket is hard to get and ours is well-worn. The car has run as good as 12.30s at VMP. In Drive, the car was shifting around 4400 or so for some reason today; normally, it runs those mid-12s all the time.” -Collis Bryant

“My favorite moment in the car was beating the track champion at VMP with it. We have four children and seven grandchildren, and we enjoyed coming up here and meeting new people and seeing the cars. This was a good event.” -Anna Bryant

Calm and Collected ‘CudaBill Burke, age: 43, East Norwich, NY
Bill Burke has been racing his ’69 Barracuda for many years, and he came out to bracket test it with a variety of rear tire pressures. Unlike many of the others, the East Norwich, New York-based school system administrator has already done most of the work to make his car consistent for racing, so he was well aware of what the car liked. The five runs he recorded varied by less than 11/410 of second despite the different times of day. He has posted final round showings at Englishtown for the Mopar Atlantic Nationals. Bill’s 360 is a crate motor, which was a basic install into the A-Body for bracket racing purposes. He also has mufflers on the car due to the noise restrictions at the track.

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